AT&T 'Spy Room' Documents Unsealed; You've Already Seen Them

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AT&T 'Spy Room' Documents Unsealed; You've Already Seen Them

A civil liberties group suing telecom giant AT&T for allegedly installing illegal secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of the National Security Agency published substantial portions of long-sealed case documents Tuesday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit, filed in January 2006, relies partly on documents provided to the group by Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who took three documents home with him when he retired in 2004. Those documents have been under seal in a San Francisco federal court. Wired News and other news organizations sought unsuccessfully to have them unsealed earlier this year.

However, this week AT&T acceded to the documents' partial disclosure after the EFF threatened to take the matter of their sealing to a federal appeals court. Portions of the sealed documents had been published by Wired News in May of 2006, and more recently by the PBS news program Frontline. AT&T agreed to the disclosure of those portions to escape the embarrassment of arguing that documents available on the internet for more than a year were secret, according to Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director.

AT&T declined to comment on the disclosure.

There are no surprises in the AT&T documentation published Tuesday, which consist of a subset of the pages already published by Wired News. They include AT&T wiring diagrams, equipment lists and task orders that appear to show the company tapping into fiber-optic cables at the point where its backbone network connects to other ISPs at a San Francisco switching office. The documents appear to show the company siphoning off the traffic to a room packed with internet-monitoring gear.

Released along with the AT&T documents is a formerly sealed signed declaration from Klein, and a written analysis of the documents penned by internet expert J. Scott Marcus, which have been kept mostly under wraps by a court order that applied to the parties in the case.

The interpretation of Klein's documents by Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, are the most interesting documents released Tuesday.

"This configuration appears to have the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic," Marcus wrote.

AT&T likely has 15 to 20 of these rooms around the country, and shipped data out of the rooms via a separate network to another location, Marcus concluded. Collectively, he estimated that the rooms were able to keep tabs on some 10 percent of the nation's purely domestic internet traffic.

The document release comes as AT&T, the EFF and the government prepare to battle in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August, where the government and AT&T seek overturn a lower court order allowing the case to proceed toward trial.

The government argues that the case must be thrown out since it involves national security matters, while AT&T says it can't defend itself without spilling classified information. Federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled last July that the case could proceed, because President Bush has admitted the existence of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of Americans' overseas communications.

"Dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security," Walker wrote.

Cohn says she hopes the new documents will illustrate to the public that the organization's case is grounded in fact, and that the government's argument that national security is at risk is overstated.

"It really paints them into a corner, how unreasonable their claims of state secrets are," Cohn said. "I'm hoping (the document release) demonstrates we are right and know what we are talking about and that we don't need much more to win our case. We are much closer than people think."

AT&T declined comment, except to issue this official oft-repeated statement on the case: "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security."

In a court filing, the company's lawyers called Wired News a "scofflaw" for publishing the documents last year.